EMPIRE OF LETTERS

EMPIRE OF LETTERS

Eighteenth-century English, Scottish and American letter manuals,among the most frequently reprinted books of the era, spread normsof polite conduct and communication, helping not only to connectand unify different regions of the British Atlantic world, but to fostervery different local and regional cultures and values. By teachingsecret writing, they also enabled transatlantic correspondents tocommunicate what they wanted despite interception, censorshipand the practice of reading private letters in company. Eve TavorBannet uncovers what people knew then about letters that we haveforgotten, revolutionizing our understanding of eighteenth-centuryletters, novels, periodicals, and other kinds of writing that used theletter form in print as well as manuscript. This lively, widely re-searched interdisciplinary study will change the ways we read andinterpret eighteenth-century letters and think about the book in theAtlantic world.

eve tavor bannet is Professor of English at the University ofOklahoma. Her previous books include The Domestic Revolution(Baltimore, 2000) and Structuralism and the Logic of Dissent(London, 1989, 1991). Her work appears in journals includingEighteenth-Century Studies, The Eighteenth-Century Novel, HuntingtonLibrary Quarterly and New Literary History.

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Cambridge University Press0521856183 - Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and TransatlanticCorrespondence, 1688-1820Eve Tavor BannetFrontmatterMore information

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Frontispiece Thomas Fleet’s imprint on an American edition of John Hill’s YoungSecretary’s Guide (1750), reproduced by permission of the Beinecke Rare Book and

Manuscripts Library, Yale University.






EMPIRE OF LETTERS

Letter Manuals and TransatlanticCorrespondence, 1688–1820

EVE TAVOR BANNET






CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Cambridge University PressThe Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

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© Eve Tavor Bannet 2005

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Contents

Acknowledgments page viiPrologue ix

part i letter manuals and eighteenth-century

letteracy

Introduction 3

1 Empire of letters 9

Education for the post 9

Letter manuals’ target audiences 20

Representing the household-family 37

Familiar letters and everyday conversation 42

2 Manual architectonics 54

Letter classes 55

The paradox of politeness 63

Proper sentiments and proper conduct 69

The letter as composition and conversation 74

Responsive reading 80

The letter as writing and vocalized speech 89

Imitation for reader-writers 94

part i i letter manuals in brita in and america

Introduction 105

3 “Secretaries” at the turn of the eighteenth century 110

London: The Young Secretary’s Guide 110

Boston: Bartholomew Green’s Young Secretary’s Guide 124

London: Thomas Goodman’s Experienc’d Secretary 129

Boston: The Young Secretary’s Guide, or Experienc’d Secretary by“Thomas Hill” 135

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New York and Philadelphia: the Bradfords’ Secretary’s Guide,Or Young Man’s Companion 140

4 The “Complete Letter-Writers” of the middle years 151

London: Crowder’s Complete Letter-Writer, or Polite English Secretary 152

Glasgow: Dilworth’s Complete Letter-Writer, or Young Secretary’s Instructor 170

New York: Dilworth’s Complete Letter-Writer, or Young Secretary’s Instructor 178

Philadelphia: McCulloch’s American Letter-Writer 181

Instructors and Academies of Compliments 185

5 The “Art of Correspondence,” 1790–1820 194

London: Cooke’s Universal Letter-Writer; or New Art of PoliteCorrespondence 197

“US Booksellers”: Cook’s New and Complete Letter-Writer, orNew Art of Polite Correspondence 210

Philadelphia: Hogan’s New Universal Letter-Writer, or CompleteArt of Polite Correspondence 213

part i i i secrecy and the transatlantic culture

of letters

Introduction 225

6 Public and hidden transcripts 229

Government by post 229

The transatlantic scene of writing 236

Transatlantic epistolary practices 254

Secret writing 264

7 From Crevecoeur to Franklin and Mr. Spectator 274

Crevecoeur’s first letter 275

The Spectator letters 287

Benjamin Franklin’s secret letter to his son 302

Afterword 313

Bibliography 316

Index 341

vi Contents






Acknowledgments

A number of individuals and organizations have materially supported theresearch and writing of this book.A fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities at

the University of Edinburgh during the spring of 2002 provided access tothe excellent resources of the National Library of Scotland and to a varietyof stimulating colleagues, both at the Institute and in the English Depart-ment of the University of Edinburgh, who taught this Londoner that theso-called “periphery” was always, in reality, another integral and passion-ately interesting center. I thank Susan Manning, Faith Hope, John Frow,Cairns Craig and Anthea Taylor for all that the visit became and forsharing some of Scotland with me.A long-term NEH fellowship at the Huntington Library during the

year 2003–4 gave me access to an invaluable transatlantic library, acongenial group of colleagues, and time to think, rethink, work andrework this book. I am grateful to the National Endowment for theHumanities and to the Huntington for making that year possible, andto all the people in Pasadena and San Marino who made it so pleasant andso productive. I am particularly indebted, in very different ways, to JeanHoward, Paulina Kewes, Richard Terdiman, Roy Richie, Susan GreenSuzie Krasnoo and Mona Schulman.Paul Bell and David Mair at the University of Oklahoma gave this

project “legs” by arranging for additional funding and for release time,more often than not after the last minute. My students at Oklahoma gotme thinking about transatlantic connections by revealing just how muchof what I was presenting to them as “Eighteenth-Century British” hadbeen passed down in their own families, often by the women, and wasstill familiar. The responses of colleagues at conferences to various bits ofthis book have been particularly helpful, as was a memorable discussionover a long weekend with Jessica Munns and Philip Woodvine. I also

vii






thank the University of Delaware Press for permission to reprint partsof my article “Epistolary Commerce in Steele’s Spectator” from DonNewman’s collection, Emerging Discourses in the Spectator.

This study is hugely better for the careful reading, acute questions andconstructive criticism of Susan Manning, Robert Hume and DanielCottom, for Cambridge University Press’s anonymous readers, and forLinda Bree’s crash course in editorial streamlining. I have been very fortu-nate in their readiness to share their expertise and in their encouragementand support.

None of this would have been possible, however, without the deter-mination, courage, devotion and extraordinary generosity of our son,Alan Bannet and my husband, Jacob, during a very difficult and challen-ging time. To them, with love and gratitude, I therefore dedicate thisbook.

viii Acknowledgments






Prologue

Despite renewed interest in letter-writing practices and widespread agree-ment that letters were central to eighteenth-century culture, the manualswhich taught those practices and disseminated them down the socialhierarchy have been almost entirely overlooked. Eighteenth-century Brit-ish and American letter manuals taught codes, conventions and practicesof letter-writing and letter-reading that have now largely been forgotten,together with the proper conduct of conversation and of familial, social,sexual, professional and commercial life. They were masterpieces ofEnlightenment taxonomy that combined, in little space, examples ofpolite domestic, social, professional and commercial correspondence,instruction in Standard English and proper forms, and conduct bookteaching in manners and morals. They often included as models theepistles of now canonical authors, several of whom also wrote manualsof their own. Self-consciously addressed to a broad and mobile public ofgentlemen, merchants, tradesmen, military officers and professionals, aswell as mariners, maidservants, apprentices and schoolchildren, women ofall ages and provincials of all ranks, letter manuals were among the mostfrequently reprinted books on both sides of the Atlantic throughout thelong eighteenth century. They were readily available from provincial aswell as London booksellers, and in America from mid-century, could beborrowed from subscription libraries in most colonies or states. Inscrip-tions in surviving copies show that personal copies were treasured bysuccessive owners, lent to friends, and handed down from generation togeneration until they fell apart. The influence of letter manuals may besaid to have rivaled even novels as popular as Clarissa or Betsy Thoughtlessin these regards.In this, their new populist incarnation, letter manuals began to prolifer-

ate in England and in British-America at the end of the seventeenthcentury, at the inception of English efforts to unite the three kingdomsand the American mainland and island colonies within a growing, and

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increasingly far-flung, commercial empire, when letters were the onlyavailable technology for distance communication. Extension of “the artof letter-writing” to all manner and ranks of people ensured that, in time,town and country, metropolis and English, Scottish and American prov-inces, would be firmly, if not always reliably, linked by a multiplicity ofepistolary networks permitting trade, war, exchanges of “intelligence,”and putative government control. With population moving back andforth through the three kingdoms and across the Atlantic highway,dissemination of the art of letter-writing also made it possible to maintainwhat contemporaries called “a good correspondency” among the manyfamilies and friends that schooling, apprenticeships, service, indentures,urbanization, emigration, trade, war, government posts and colonization,separated and dispersed. The redeployment of the letter both in itsmanuscript and print forms – not, as has been argued, print capitalismper se – made “administrative centralization” possible, “created unifiedfields of exchange and communication,” and enabled Englishmen, Scots-men, and British-Americans to imagine themselves as one transatlanticcommunity.1 To borrow Alison Gilbert Olson’s suggestive title, lettersmade the empire work.2

One of the functions of letter manuals during the long eighteenthcentury was to unite dispersed localities by facilitating the “mutualcommunication” of persons with different local and regional dialects,pronunciations, mores, memories, levels of education and ranks. Manualssupplied the lacks in a gentleman’s Latinate education, supplemented thelimits of a petty school education in the provinces and among the lowerorders, and helped produce the many “writers by trade” required by theburgeoning new bureaucracies and by Britain’s commercial and militaryexpansion into the Atlantic world. By disseminating a single standardlanguage, method and culture of polite communication, letter manualscreated common ground for the written commerce of people in differentcounties, kingdoms, provinces and estates in all the old senses of the wordcommerce – exchange, conversation, traffic, intercourse and trade. Theytherefore contributed to forging the nation and the first British empire asmuch as improved roads and transportation, the institution of the postoffice and of regular shipping routes, the periodical press, and national

See the Bibliography for full title and publication details.

1 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 42, 47; Grasso, A Speaking Aristocracy, 211.2 Olson, Making Empire Work.

x Empire of letters






days of celebration or commemoration.3 It should not therefore surpriseus to find that their value was still appreciated in America in the 1790s,when strategic thinking was dominated by the daunting size of thecountry and by the goal of increasing patriotism through education,and consensus through communication.Nevertheless, the story of letter manuals is not a depressing tale of

enforced uniformity and inexorable standardization. As we will see, themigration of letter-writing models down the social hierarchy and acrossdifferent regions of Britain and America was mediated by repeated trans-lations both of individual letters and of individual manuals into differentcultural registers. This happened both centrally in London and locally inthe provinces, but in somewhat different ways. Writers and compilers ofletter manuals for London printers and booksellers most often imitatedand rewrote extant epistolary models to adapt available formulae andconventions to their changing sense of the culture, the fashion, and theirtarget audience. Both descriptive and prescriptive, they also sought to“improve” their users by offering examples of whatever conduct andsentiments they considered proper to people of different ranks, ages andgenders with different relative duties and concerns. Local Scottish andAmerican printers, who adapted London manuals for their local marketswith similar goals in mind, generally proceeded by selection and reorder-ing rather than by rewriting, using such devices of compilatio and ordina-tio as excision (or abridgement), juxtaposition, clustering, reclassification,sequencing and recontextualization to alter the ideological bent, and eventhe stylistic choices, of their London “copy.” In these longstanding,traditional ways, they created, often under the same title, what was inmany cases an entirely different text. Indeed, some manuals were alteredand revised so thoroughly or so frequently from edition to edition thatover time, they became quite different from themselves.In this case, therefore, print was not a fixed and reifying technology.

Letter manuals belie the modern opposition between the manuscriptenvironment where “texts are malleable and social” and the print culturewhere texts are “fixed and possessively individualistic”; and they preventcentralization of printing in London from figuring without qualificationas “a politically centrifugal force, designed to serve the core interestsof the politically centralized nation-state.”4 Thanks to the changing

3 Colley, Britons ; Clive and Bailyn, “England’s Cultural Provinces”; Bailyn, Peopling; Pagden, Lordsof all the World; Landsman, “Provinces and the Empire.”

4 Marotti and Bristol (eds.), Print, Manuscript and Performance, 5, 5–6.

Prologue xi






compilations and adaptations of regional printers, the same models ofwriting and conduct circulated differently in different parts of Britainand America, at once promoting mutual identification and strengthen-ing distinct provincial identities. For regional and American printers,“anglicization” and “exceptionalism” went hand in hand.

Imitation, with which we will be repeatedly concerned, did not meancopying in the eighteenth century, though it could. Accusations of pla-giarism abounded in literary circles at the end of the seventeenth centuryas theaters, printers and booksellers began to treat literary texts aspotentially profitable literary property. Grammarians at the end of theeighteenth century complained that everyone was repeating the sameepistolary forms, expressions, sentiments and models. And early nine-teenth-century American writers who sought to construct a distinctlyAmerican literature treated imitations of English writings with hostilityas “a servile aspect of dependency.”5 But during the long eighteenthcentury, imitation as such was not proscribed even by the most rabidcritics of plagiarism. It continued to link Europe and the Atlantic worldacross difference, because everyone was still being taught to write byimitating models. Especially where letter-writing instruction was con-cerned, it was a commonplace that imitating examples was more effica-cious than applying precepts. This did not necessarily make for sameness.As a method of teaching epistolary writing and of generating new letters,imitation was conceived and practiced as a system that only began with aphase of transcription and copying. Imitation was supposed to advance,with a pupil’s growing proficiency, through rewording and then throughthe variation, correction, amplification, inversion or radical adaptation ofthe model or models in use, to their “improvement” and creative trans-formation. Familiarity with the same basic models and classes of lettermeant that one of the pleasures of reading a letter, as well as an importantway of interpreting meaning, involved recognition of the implicit modeland of the changes that had been introduced. In these more advancedforms, moreover, imitation was an old, classical and humanist, technethat, in Derridean terms, permitted writers to re-mark their letters bothinside and outside the culture, conventions and expressions inscribed intheir model texts. Inasmuch as the writers and printers of letter manualsthemselves used imitation to produce new letters and new compilations ofletters, these too represent – and require of us – readings in terms ofrepetition and difference, in which new manuals are articulated on old,

5 Granqvist, Imitation as Resistance, 11; Kewes, Authorship; Griffin, Faces of Anonymity.

xii Empire of letters






and letters written in the present are placed in dialogue with letters ofthe past.Neither letters nor letter manuals were new in the eighteenth century.

The letter or epistle was a classical genre, and the first letter manuals inEnglish date from the Renaissance. Most early English manuals wereheavily influenced by Erasmus in the sixteenth century and by French-man, Puget de la Serre, in the seventeenth century. Indeed, many modelletters in early English manuals were more or less direct translations fromclassical, humanist or French sources. Until after the Restoration, lettermanuals in English generally offered models geared to courtly occasionsor to a classically educated readership. They treated letters as a branch ofeloquence, and surrounded them with models of oral conversation, orwith lists of commonplaces and discussions of rhetorical figures andtropes. Some features of these early manuals were carried over intothe late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For instance, classical,humanist and French letters continued to figure as models in somemid-eighteenth-century manuals. Sixteenth-century manuals like WilliamFulwood’s Enimie of Idleness (1568) or Angel Day’s English Secretorie (1599)exemplified different kinds of epistolary writing by using both real andfictive models, and employed humanist methods of classification andinstruction. Eighteenth-century manuals followed suit. During the Re-naissance and seventeenth century, there were also one or two earlyexemplars of manuals designed for a non-courtly and non-learned reader-ship, such as The Merchant’s Avizo (1589) which contained models for allthe letters a Bristol factor or apprentice might need to write his masterduring a short business trip to Portugal or Spain, or The Secretaries StudyContaining New Familiar Epistles Wherein Ladies, Gentlemen and all thatare ambitious to write and speak elegantly, and elaborately, in a succinct andfacetious strein, are furnished with fit Phrases, Emphaticall expressions, andvarious directions for the most polish’d and judicious way of inditing Letters,Whether Amorous, Civill, Houshold, Politick, Chiding, Excusing, Request-ing, Gratulatory, Or Nuncupatory by S. S. Gent. (1652). But even herethose who are not ladies or gentlemen are merely subsumed under “allthat are ambitious.” The model letters within are dominated by flowerygallantries and letters of compliment after the manner of the popularseventeenth-century Academies of Complement, which were heavily influ-enced by the French. And the few household or domestic letters that areoffered assume possession of a fairly comfortable country estate.This book opens at the beginning of the long eighteenth century, when

most letter manuals began to address the needs of a wider and more

Prologue xiii






diverse public, to associate letter-writing with grammar and spelling aswell as with rhetoric, to include business letters and legal forms, and to actas conduct books for polite domestic, social, professional and commercialmanners and morals. I will place this beginning in 1687, when John Hill’strend-setting manual and transatlantic best-seller, The Young Secretary’sGuide, or A Speedy Help to Learning, was officially licensed. I will concludearound 1820, when the last eighteenth-century models of epistolarywriting began, slowly, to go out of print. I do not wish to claim thatthese dates represent clear-cut beginnings and endings. When we areconsidering manuals that made a habit of rewriting and reassemblingtheir predecessors’ letters, we inevitably enter and leave history in mediasres. But it does appear that between these dates there was fairly widespreadagreement about the format of Secretaries and Letter-Writers, whom theyshould address, what they should contain, and what they should do.

During the long eighteenth century, British and American lettermanuals were miscellanies of fragments, which came in a variety of relatedforms. All centered on an anthology of heterogeneous and apparentlydiscontinuous model letters between fictional generic characters or socialtypes (such as landlord and tenant, merchant and apprentice, sister andbrother or father and son), that were designed to teach the art of letter-writing by imitation.

Secretaries and Complete Letter-Writers generally bound their modelletters together in a compendium with a variety of legal forms andprecedents and with everything else a person might need to write a politeletter in “proper” English: a short grammar, rules for punctuation, somebrief directions for letter-writing, a guide to the forms of polite address, adictionary of hard words, a spelling dictionary for homonyms, a list ofcontractions, and instructions for the formatting, appearance and foldingof letters. They sometimes also included formulae for cards or for peti-tions, and verse epistles. As we will see, all these elements of what I willcall compendia were ideologically weighted in different ways, and thevalues they persistently conveyed were as important as their utilitarianfunctions.

Compendia were also truncated into what I will call Letter-miscellanies.Letter-miscellanies such as Samuel Richardson’s Letters Written to andfor Particular Friends on the most Important Occasions (1741),6 ElizaHaywood’s Epistles for the Ladies (1749), The Ladies Complete Letter-Writer

6 Familiar Letters on Important Occasions is the title Brian W. Downs gave his 1928 edition of thiswork.

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(1763) or Vicesimus Knox’s Elegant Epistles (1790) were simply collectionsof model letters without the compendium’s outwork of supporting ma-terials. Some were designed to instruct letter-writers in a more indirectand entertaining manner or for the improvement of style. Some, like TheArt of Letter-Writing (1762) or The Correspondent (1790), offered critical orexplanatory comments between letters and sizable introductions to letter-writing practices. Most silently reproduced the kinds of model letters thatmight otherwise be found in compendia. Secretaries and Complete Letter-Writers often purloined letters from Letter-miscellanies, as well as fromeach other.Abbreviated Secretaries or Letter-Writers were also inserted into even

more compendious vade mecums, such as William Mather’s Young Man’sCompanion, or Arithmetic Made Easy (1710), George Fisher’s The In-structor, or Young Man’s Best Companion (1735) or Thomas Wise’s TheNewest Young Man’s Companion (1758). These taught numeracy, book-keeping, measuring and surveying and other practical skills as well asepistolography, and gave directions for making and preserving ink, forcutting the nibs on quill pens, and for writing secret letters.Finally, there was an ongoing tradition of “Merriments” or witty take-

offs on standard letters, that can be traced back to translations andimitations of Frenchman Nicholas Breton’s A Poste with a madde Packetof Letters (1602). During the eighteenth century, the popularity of merri-ments declined in the wake of stern warnings by moralists and conductbook-writers that ridicule was more likely to offend than instruct andamuse. Because merriments like Charles Gildon’s A Postboy robb’d of hisMail (1692, 1693) or epistolary parts of the Spectator (1711) often used athin fictional thread to connect disparate letters, twentieth-century NewCritics tended to read the few they admired as “literature” and to overlooktheir character as letter manuals as a result. Merriments performed thesame functions as other letter manuals – if anything their introduction ofa guide, fictional critic or group of critics to comment on the letters theypresented enabled them to make their instructions more explicit thancompendia could. The difference is that merriments were directed to adouble audience: while giving some plain instruction to the epistographi-cally challenged, they used satire, wit and comic distance to recyclemanual materials for a more elite, learned or sophisticated readership.Compendia and letter-miscellanies often included a few sample letters ofmerriment.The great achievement of the new “English school,” and of the letter

manuals that publicized its teachings, was to disseminate letter-writing

Prologue xv






down the social hierarchy and to make epistolary kinds, codes andconventions familiar to all manner and ranks of people. One might saythat the eighteenth century naturalized the idea that anyone can (orshould be able to) read and write a letter. Together with the persistenceof some of the eighteenth-century letter’s formal features into the presentday, this long misled us into believing that we still knew all the codes, andthat eighteenth-century letters could be read as straightforward historicalevidence, or as giving us privileged insights into what people privatelythought and truly felt. These preconceptions are being altered by agrowing number of excellent, cultural and historical, studies of particularearly modern or romantic epistolary practices, of surviving epistolaryexchanges and collections of family letters, and of novels using epistolaryform.7 We now realize that “letters are not unmediated historical arte-facts.”8 We have become increasingly aware that there is still a great dealthat we do not know about letter-writing and letter-reading. But we havenot gone back to letter manuals to investigate the epistolary codes,practices, presuppositions and ideologies that were taught and assumed.

The only three sustained modern studies of either British or Americanletter manuals during either the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries arelong New Critical and bibliographical essays which date from the 1930sand 1940s.9 There have been some important related studies since then:Roger Chartier’s ground-breaking work on seventeenth-century Frenchletter manuals, Jonathan Goldberg’s brilliant analysis of the writing ofletters (in both senses) during the English Renaissance, and Ian Michael’sencyclopedic investigation of the teaching of English from the sixteenth tothe nineteenth centuries.10 But the voluminous corpus of British andAmerican letter manuals during the long eighteenth century remains asclose to a completely untapped resource as it is possible to get in eight-eenth-century studies. Closer acquaintance with this material will subvertany comfortable assurance that eighteenth-century letters can be read

7 For instance, Daybell, Early Modern Women Letter Writers ; Earle (ed.), Epistolary Selves ; Goldgar,Impolite Learning ; Goodman, Republic of Letters ; Harrison, Until Next Year ; Jagodzinski, Privacyand Print ; Barton and Hall (eds.), Letter-Writing ; Cook, Epistolary Bodies ; Favret, RomanticCorrespondence ; Gilroy and Verhoeven (eds.), Epistolary Histories ; How, Epistolary Spaces ;Lowenthal, Lady Mary.

8 Earle (ed.), Epistolary Selves, 1.9 Hornbeak, “Complete Letter-Writer in English, 1568–1800” (1934); Robertson, The Art of Letter-Writing (1943); Weiss, American Letter-Writers, 1698–1943 (1945). There are some acute insights inAltman’s “Political Ideology in the Letter Manual,” and a chapter on letter manuals in Dierks,“Letter-Writing, Gender and Class in America.”

10 Roger Chartier (ed.), Correspondence ; Goldberg, Writing Matter ; Michael, Teaching of English.

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reliably either as “a window in the bosom” or as transparent historicaldocuments. Manuals show that letters inhabited an extremely complexand highly developed cultural and rhetorical system which offers a verydifferent interpretative box of tools.The questions driving this study relate primarily to how letter manuals

may be read, how they transmitted and altered discursive practices andcultural norms, and what they can tell us about Enlightenment epistolo-graphy and about how to read an eighteenth-century correspondence. Iam coining the term “letteracy” to designate the collection of differentskills, values, and kinds of knowledge beyond mere literacy that wereinvolved in achieving competency in the writing, reading and interpretingof letters. Under letteracy, I include associated cultural information, suchas common conceptions of letter-writing, awareness of current epistolarypractices, basic knowledge about where letter-writing was taught andabout how it was taught or to be learned, even how to “read” and use aletter manual. The three parts of this book approach the question of whatletteracy consisted of, how it was transmitted and how it was practiced, indifferent but complementary ways, each of which will be introduced morefully at the beginning of each part.Part I explores the recurrent features of Secretaries and Letter-Writers

on the basis of a wide variety of London manuals. Chapter 1 discusseshow English manuals represented their target audiences, their con-texts and functions, and their relations to everyday life. It also considersthe questions relating to literacy and schooling and to the uses andaccessibility of the post that arise as soon as one begins to evaluate Englishmanuals’ surprisingly broad sense of their public. Chapter 2 deciphers thenow unfamiliar architectonics of eighteenth-century compendia. It ex-plains the content and significance of their various taxonomies, theorganization of their letter-collections and the relations between theiroutwork and model letters. It also describes the epistolary conventionsand practices of reading and interpretation that manuals taught, themethods they employed to teach reading and convey ideology, anddifferent ways in which they might be used by people with different levelsof education and ability. The emphasis throughout is on what thesefeatures of manuals teach us about how to write and read a letter. Oneof the important things to understand at the outset is that letters were notconstrued by eighteenth-century manuals, or indeed by writing masters,as a primarily private or closeted genre. When they spoke of reading,they meant reading aloud. The letter, which was conceived as issuingfrom speech and as returning to speech at the point of oral delivery, was

Prologue xvii






a shape-changer. It reconfigured itself through a variety of media –manuscript, print and voice – as it traveled across space and time.

Part II examines the ways in which letter manuals themselves werechanged from printing to printing and from place to place as they traveledthe Atlantic to America and were redesigned by local printers for differentlocal audiences. Along with bibles, psalters, primers and grammars, lettermanuals were among the earliest types of book that were not only printedin Britain and regularly imported into the American provinces, but alsoreprinted and consciously “fitted” by local American printers to the valuesand needs of their local customers. The importation, reprinting andadaptation of British letter manuals continued well into the early Repub-lic. It is therefore surprising that so little attention has been paid to themby early Americanists or by historians of the book in the Atlantic world.

A fairly large number of different letter manuals were produced forLondon booksellers between 1688 and 1820, but relatively few were steadysellers in the sense that the market for them justified more than two orthree London editions and encouraged repeated reprints and adaptationsin the provinces. The manuals that dominated the English, Scottish andAmerican markets in both these ways – by dissemination from Londonand repeated reproduction and adaptation in the provinces – and whichconsequently familiarized comparatively large numbers of people withwhat letters ought to say and do, are those which have been selected foranalysis in this part of the book, which focuses primarily on the collec-tions of letters in each case. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 are organized by thesuccessive London manuals which dominated the home market and gaverise to American and Scottish adaptations. Chapter 3 covers the periodfrom 1688 to around 1740, when John Hill’s and Thomas Goodman’sSecretaries were widely reprinted, adapted and altered in America. Chapter 4covers the second half of the eighteenth century, when Scottish versions ofCrowder’s and Dilworth’s Complete Letter-Writers were preferred andused as bases for American adaptations. And Chapter 5 considers diverseuses made of Cooke’s popular Universal Letter-Writer; or Art of Corres-pondence from the 1790s on. I have followed a certain number of conductbook subjects across all these manuals to facilitate comparison and high-light change. These include representations of friendship between men,professional life, trade and commerce, the household, apprenticeship anddomestic service, the role of women, marriage, education, travel, absenceand conversation.

Together, these chapters offer ideological and stylistic analyses of theletter-collections in the compendia that were most frequently reprinted in

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Britain, and cover the surprisingly large number of American imprintsthat were not mere reprints. The fact that manuals were frequentlyaltered, even by their original printers, means that each manual titlerepresented a variable “series” of versions rather than the label for a fixedbook. This has understandably led to some bibliographical confusion inthe ESTC. One of the things that Chapters 3 to 5 do, in conjunction withthe bibliography at the end, is establish filiations between manuals andshow which were versions of which.Having examined the architectonics and recurrent features of letter

manuals, and the ways in which London manuals were transformed andtranslated into different cultural registers by printers in America andScotland, this book goes on in Part III to comply with eighteenth-centuryinjunctions that to be adequate, book learning must be complemented byan acquaintance with the world. In a segment on “The Principles ofPoliteness,” The New Letter-Writer, or The Art of Correspondence (1775)insisted that “Secrecy is a characteristic of Good-Breeding.” Othermanuals warned their reader-writers to be wary of putting their realthoughts down on paper for more practical reasons of discretion in theface of publicity, interception and censorship. Vade mecums gave instruc-tion in secret writing. Chapter 6 addresses such instructions by exploringthe culture of secrecy that issued from the codes of politeness and that wasreinforced both by the practice of reading letters aloud to one’s “com-pany” and by justified fears of interception and censorship. Withoutpretending to be exhaustive, it shows how the epistolary Doppelganger ofsimultaneously public and hidden transcripts manifested itself in variouspublic and private forms of transatlantic communication, and exploressome of the ways in which letters communicated what they could not say,and alerted their recipients to what they concealed. Chapter 7 concludeswith brief analyses of three canonical literary texts – Crevecoeur’s firstLetter from an American Farmer, The Spectator, and Franklin’s Autobiog-raphy – which review and illustrate the matter discussed in each part of thebook. This respects and underlines the fact that the eighteenth centuryassumed a continuity between letters in different areas and levels ofculture. Rather than aiming at closure, these texts open letter manualsonto what we have considered “good literature,” by showing that they canalter the way we understand familiar texts.Novels too presupposed the letteracy to be explored in this book,

and were often preoccupied by it. At the beginning of our period, forinstance, in Love Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister (1684–87),which was roughly contemporaneous with Hill’s manual, Aphra Behn

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uses a narrative frame in Part II to describe her characters’ reflections and/or conversations about the letters they read and write. The narrativepunctures that naive credulity in the immediacy and sincerity of letterswhich was allowed Silvia (and the reader) in Part I, by underscoring thedifference between what characters think, desire or mean and what theyactually write. The narrative repeatedly shows that letters can be manipu-lative and deceptive even when they are as essentially true in content,sincere in style, and dutiful in sentiment, subscriptions and compliments,as the following letter to Philander:

. . .I conclude [Octavio] a Lover, tho’ without Success; what Effects that mayhave upon the Heart of Silvia, only Time can render an Account of: And whoseConduct I shall the more particularly observe from a Curiosity natural to me, tosee if it may be possible for Silvia to love again, after the adorable Philander,which Levity in one so perfect would cure me of the Disease of Love, while I liv’damongst the fickle Sex: But since no such Thought can yet get Possession of myBelief, I humbly beg your Lordship will entertain no Jealousie, that may be sofatal to your Repose, and to that of Silvia; doubt not but my Fears proceedperfectly from the Zeal I have for your Lordship, for whose Honour andTranquility none shall venture so far as, my Lord, your Lordship’s most Humbleand Obedient Servant, Brillard.

The narrative undercuts this letter’s prima facie meaning by explainingthat Brillard’s purpose is to “hint” at Silvia’s “Levity” in such a way as tostir his addressee’s resentment without giving him any suspicion thatBrillard’s own motive is anything but “Duty and Respect to Philander.”Its descriptions of Brillard’s calculations prior to writing about “how tomanage [Philander] to his best Advantage” and of his critical re-reading ofhis letter “to see whether he had cast it to his Purposes,” remind the readerthat epistolography was an art of rhetoric, which educated men used topersuade and move others in predetermined ways, and that womengenerally lacked such classical rhetorical schooling.11 This is also theterminus ad quem of Silvia’s education in Part II. Silvia’s transformationfrom the “controlled woman” of Part I into the “controlling woman whomanipulates her desirability”12 in Part II, is mediated by a series ofrealizations about the artifice of the “Rhetoric of Love” as expressed inthe language, style, tone, repetitions, flattery and conventions of loveletters. These realizations make Silvia an increasingly resisting reader,and teach her to write letters as carefully crafted rhetorical instruments

11 Behn, Love Letters (London, 1708), 168, 169.12 Todd, “Hot brute,” 278.

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for particular effects, rather than as “unthinking, artless Speaking” thatexpresses the true “Sense of her Soul.”13 Letter manuals begin from here.Towards the end of our period, Jane Austen assumed far greater

familiarity with epistolary matters and expected readers, once primed, tobe able to determine the character and meaning of interpolated letters forthemselves. In Pride and Prejudice (1813), for instance, readers are primedthrough a conversation in Bingley’s drawing room, where Darcy is writinga letter, about how letter-writers betray not only their character, but alsotheir attitude to friendship, through their “stile of writing.” Miss Bingleyreminds us that “stile” is manifest, among other things, in the letter’slength, handwriting, formatting, and vocabulary; in the speed or deliber-ation, ease or restraint of the writing; and in epistolary representationsof the degree of familiarity between the parties – all manual topics. One ofthe ironies of this scene is that Miss Bingley has just betrayed her owncharacter and attitude to friendship in her letter of invitation to Jane:

My dear friend,If you are not so compassionate as to dine today with Louise and me, we shall

be in danger of hating each other for the rest of our lives, for a whole day’s tete-a-tete between two women can never end without a quarrel. Come as soon as youcan on the receipt of this. My brother and the gentlemen are to dine with theofficers. Yours ever, Caroline Bingley.14

The narrator generally focalizes the meaning of letters through charac-ters’ interpretations and reactions, leaving the reader to measure the latteragainst her own reading of the interpolated letters. In this case, Lydiaseizes on Miss Bingley’s reference to officers, Mrs. Bennett laments thegentlemen’s absence, and Jane turns the conversation to questions oftransportation. Their reading characterizes them. Letterate readers willnotice, however, that all ignore Caroline’s “stile of writing.” They fail tonotice that the suggestion in the superscription and subscription thatCaroline will consider Jane her “dear friend” for “ever” is belied in thebody of the letter by her careless over-familiarity and fashionable postur-ing (“tete-a-tete”) and by the implication in her use of the imperative(“Come. . .”) that Caroline views Jane as very much her social inferior.Caroline’s friendship is also belied by the disrespect and lack of consider-ation indicated through her omission of the proper sentiments for lettersof this kind: “I hope you are not engaged”; “your company you knowhow we value”; “I am sure I need not tell you we shall do all we can to

13 Behn, Love Letters, 211.14 Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 77.

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render [your visit] agreeable. . .” Jane discovers only during a much latervisit to London that she has been “entirely deceived in Miss Bingley’sregard for me.” She insists in a letter to her sister that her misplaced“confidence” in Caroline has been “natural” and that in “the samecircumstances. . . I am sure I should be deceived again.”15 But letteratereaders, who have understood the value of Caroline’s “regard” from herfirst letter, will think: “You would be deceived again only if you againignored stile of writing.”

The bridge between letter manuals and novels is not necessarily tobe sought in “the literary familiar letter.” Like Caroline’s letter of invita-tion or Jane’s letter of news, letters in novels often belong to thoseapparently insignificant classes of familiar letter which were modeledin letter manuals and did the everyday business of life. Letter manualsand novels both exemplified the same complex eighteenth-century cultureof letters, and can also shed light on one another in other ways. I suggestsome as I go along. Readers will, I hope, make other connections oftheir own.

The overall structure of this book assumes as a given the position nowtaken by both British and American scholars of the Atlantic world, whoexplore the networks of politics, commerce, culture and communicationthat crossed national borders and national literatures, and who argue thatduring the long eighteenth century, America, the West Indies and Scot-land were all cultural provinces of England. I am profoundly indebted tothe work of Bernard Bailyn, Jack P. Green, David Shields, RichardBushman, William Spengeman, Susan Manning, Barbara de Wolfe,David Hackett Fischer, Ian Steele, Angus Calder, Ned Landsman andothers, who have opened transatlantic studies to the movement of people,ideas, books and goods in important and interesting new ways. Taking atransatlantic perspective alters what we are able to see of our own English,Scottish or American cultures, and repositions what we thought we knew.

Letter manuals were interdisciplinary compilations. I am therefore alsoheavily indebted to scholars in a variety of disparate literary, cultural andhistorical fields working on a variety of English, Scottish, French, andAmerican materials, whose work has shown me how to approach, con-textualize, or understand the history of, particular aspects of thesemanuals. I have drawn on modern studies of letters, politeness, censor-ship, rhetoric, grammar, manuscript culture, conduct books and the art ofconversation, on the history of the book and the history of reading, on

15 Ibid., 184.

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social, economic and imperial history, the history of education andliteracy, and histories of language, law, urbanization and institutions.My major debts will be evident in the bibliography and notes.This book can only claim to make some preliminary inroads into as yet

largely uncharted territory. I hope that it will draw attention to theinterest and importance of eighteenth-century British and American lettermanuals and to the further work they invite from a variety of scholarlyperspectives.

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Documents

EMPIRE OF LETTERS